Knowledge management maturity: the significance of organizational infrastructure for the development of its stages

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to identify the impact and describe the behavior of the organizational infrastructure in the stages of the knowledge management development. For this, a data collection was carried out with 125 managers of the 46 Units of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company - Embrapa, a Technology-Based Company, which is national and internationally recognized due to its high innovation rates. In this study, the organizational infrastructure required to develop the knowledge management was defined as: organizational structure, decision-making, communication process, degree of formalization of activities and organizational environment. The results concluded that the organizational structure becomes more flexible, the decision-making more decentralized, the communication process in all directions (top down, bottom up and between areas) increases consecutively and the environment allows greater communication and interaction among people throughout the advancement of the stages, corroborating the theory. However, in the opposite direction to what is suggested by the theory, the degree of formalization of activities increases over the development of the stages. The research contributes to complement the study of knowledge management and to identify and describe, empirically for the first time, the organizational structure of knowledge management stages.

Keywords:
Knowledge management; Stages; Maturity; Organizational infrastructure